Mind Alteration

Drug-policy scholar Ethan Nadelmann on turning people against drug prohibition

Jacob Sullum from the July 1994 issue

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Reason: How do you explain the response to your 1988 article in Foreign Policy?

Nadelmann: My article would not have done it without Schmoke. His speech was really the key thing. Part of it was that there was this war-on-drugs hysteria going on, and journalists kept looking for stories, any story with a new angle. Plus, there was this silent view, held fairly widely, that there was something screwy with the war on drugs. There were enough people around who realized that it struck a chord.

Reason: In what ways has the drug-policy debate changed since 1988? What did the reaction to Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders's remarks about legalization show?

Nadelmann: Now the legalization issue is being played less for entertainment value and more as a serious thing. Whereas before we were piggybacking this war- on drugs craze, now that's died away, and there's a much more substantive interest in drug-policy alterna- tives. When Schmoke said it, the reaction was, "Oh my God, did you hear what he said?" There were a lot of jokes about him being a one term mayor. With Elders, you had the talking heads on the Sunday morning programs and mayors, from Frank Jordan in San Francisco to Sharon Pratt Kelly in Washington, all saying, "Look, what's wrong with talking about this stuff?"

What did she say? She said legalization would reduce crime, which seems pretty clear. She said the Europeans are doing some interesting things. Well, that's certainly the case; we should learn more about their "harm reduction" approach. And she said we should study it. So she put it out there in a way that was quite acceptable to people. If you look at the editorial pages, I bet you'd find much more support for what Elders said than for what Schmoke said six years ago.

More and more people are coming up to me and other people who speak on this issue and saying, "You know, four or five years ago, when I first heard it, I thought it was crazy. Now I think I agree with you." So a lot of people are changing their minds, as opposed to four or five years ago, when people would come up to me or Schmoke and say, "You know, I agreed with this all along."

Reason: How would you describe your politics? What aspects of libertarianism appeal to you, and what aspects trouble you?

Nadelmann: I vote for the Democratic Party pretty consistently, with an occasional protest vote for a Libertarian. My politics are fairly eclectic. They're probably more conventionally liberal than they are conventionally conservative. I m sympathetic to a lot of what the ACLU does, but I don t agree with the whole social agenda. I identify more with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, but I'm definitely not comfortable, given a lot of the bullshit that they've put forward, especially on issues I care about.

On drugs, and crime generally, there's an over-emphasis on criminal justice approaches. The general trend toward the federalization of crime has been a big mistake. The Democrats are not more wrong than the Republicans in this area. The damage has been that they've followed the Republicans on a lot of these issues. They've essentially sold out their own principles. People like Charlie Rangel, [Sen.] Joe Biden, and [Rep.] Charlie Schumer use the drug issue as their way to be tough on crime.

The most important aspect of libertarianism to me is the focus on individual au- tonomy in areas that to me are the logical extension of First and Fourth Amendment rights-- the ones that have to do with privacy especially. When you get into drugs and other vices, I like the notion of treating adults as fully responsible: on the one hand, giving them the freedom to make their own mistakes and pursue their own virtues and vices; on the other hand, holding people responsible for their behavior. There should not be an abundance of excuses for that type of stuff.

What's especially appealing is that the libertarians seem to have a coherent understanding of what individual autonomy means in the context of a complex society. That's what most motivates me. What I most care about is advancing this notion of individual autonomy. When women talk about having control over their own bodies vis-à-vis abortion, they should realize that's one and the same as talking about control over one's own consciousness vis-à-vis drugs. If people want the power to sell their bodies--the same thing. When gays and others talk about sexual privacy, once again it's the same thing. And all these freedoms are not fundamentally different from the freedoms of speech, press, and religion that most Americans now take for granted--but that were once as contentious as the right to control one's body and one's consciousness is now. Drugs are an integral dimension of that.

The emphasis of libertarians on property rights is something that I've never cared as much about. Yes, the privacy of one's home and one's property is very important. But the notion that we reach optimal solutions, whether based on some sort of cost-benefit analysis or on purely ideological grounds, by having the government uninvolved in economic transactions, is something I'm not persuaded about, although I haven't studied it in any great depth.

Reason: What is the main obstacle to getting people to think seriously about legalization? What is the most important thing that someone who is skeptical about legalization should know?

Nadelmann: The most important objective now-- rhetorically, intellectually, and conceptually--is getting people to focus on prohibition as the problem, in the way that people saw alcohol prohibition as the problem. The fact of the matter is. it's a prohibition system, but most Americans don't think of it that way, because we've all grown up under it. We don't envision the alternative. The most important thing is to get people, when they hear about shootings in the street, to say, "Damn that prohibition." not "Damn those drugs." Or when they hear about the courts being overflooded and the prisons being overflooded and violent prisoners being let out, they should say, not "Damn drugs," but "Damn prohibition." Or when they hear about a rash of overdose deaths on the street, or the drug-AIDS connection, same thing. It s getting people to talk about it and think about it in those terms, to understand the analogy to alcohol prohibition.

The most important obstacle is this deep-seated fear of drugs that's very much analogous to the fear of communism. The roles that communism and drugs have played in American politics are quite similar. In the case of communism, there was an external threat, but the communists were not knocking on our doors. Drugs do come from abroad, but it's not as if we're being overwhelmed by these things. And yes, there were communist spies in this country, but there wasn't a commie under every bed. Yes, there is a drug problem in this country, but there isn't a drug addict in every corner. Invasion of the Body Snatchers symbolized communist brainwashing in the '50s; it symbolizes drug brainwashing and the capture of our children today. One of the core truths in Thomas Szasz's Ceremonial Chemistry is about the role that drugs play as a bogeyman in our society, in the same way that witches and Jews and others have in the past.